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receiving a “fuck you” note by youtube.

After my last video (my 100s video) didn’t get demonetized – which I found a refreshing change – youtube seems to have decided to add new chicanes. This morning I received a mail by YouTube titled “Important updates to the youtube partner program”.

In this mail they say:

“While our goal remains to keep the YPP open to as many channels as possible, we recognise that we need more safeguards in place to protect creator revenue across the YouTube ecosystem”

So the first thing I thought was “ok, so they are finally dealing with the demonetization issue, and maybe kick a few of the high profile folks who’ve done harmful things..

but they go on with:

“Under the new eligibility requirements announced today, your YouTube channel, Peter Petermann, is no longer eligible for monetization because it does not meet the new threshold of 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. As a result, your channel will lose access to all monetization tools and features associated with the YouTube Partner Program on 20 February 2018 unless you surpass this threshold in the next 30 days. Accordingly, this email serves as 30 days notice that your YouTube Partner Program terms are terminated.”

I’m a youtube creator for 10 1/2 years, I have a total of over 100k views (75k on public videos), I’m at a third the watch time, but think it could be doable… especially if the watchtime keeps climbing as it has in the past few month, so if i made a video every day… – but 1000 subscribers is completely illusory to me, I have 64.

If I have a look around on the platform, and who is actually causing trouble, by videos that really aren’t suited for advertisers, I see “prank” channels that do harmful “pranks”, usually with way more than 1000 subscribers, I see identitarians and other neo-nazis, usually with more than 1000 subscribers.. they won’t be touched by those changes at all.

Then I see youtubes golden boys, assholes like logan paul get away with posting videos of corpses – all youtube did was to remove him from the preferred ads, he’s still making millions on their platform.

but hey, the fix is to kick me out of the partner program because I don’t have 1000 subscribers, how else am I to understand that than a big “Fuck You” by youtube?

EDIT: the original post said i was above the required watch time, however I made the mistake to assume the statistics where in the same unit as the requirement – they are not, the statistics always seem to use minutes, while the requirement is mentioned in hours.